Gary Marcus: Meta's new agent Muse repeats the failures of Facebook M
Gary Marcus · rss · 2026-09-23
Gary Marcus argues Meta's new agent Muse is essentially a rerun of Facebook's failed 2015 Project M, which promised the same restaurant reservations and ticket booking.
- Project M was launched to fanfare but limited to 10,000 users due to cost, was later revealed to rely on human operators behind the scenes, and was shut down in January 2018 with only 30% of requests served by AI.
- Marcus mocks Zuckerberg for overestimating the era's AI and notes the historical echo of the Mechanical Turk hoax.
- He also criticizes Zuckerberg's privacy stance, citing Zeynep Tufekci's classic essay, concluding Meta "keeps making the same mistakes."
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